The parting century has seen tremendous growth in Radio, Television and Press as media for news and entertainment for common man. Access to information on Radio and television is totally free, while the cost of a printed newspaper is heavily subsidized to make it affordable for every Tom, Dick and Harry. All this has been possible because of the advertisements that are run on these media, the revenue from which support the delivery of these services to the users, who would have otherwise paid the full price of subscribing to these services. Without advertisements radio and television would not have become an integral part of the modern human race.
As the world prepares to enter the next millennium, computers are increasingly entering into homes to become household gadgets. Modern computers are not just capable of performing the routine computing needs, but also all the functions of conventional media, telecommunication and business transactions. All this requires the purchase of software and services by the user. Some of these costs are high enough to limit the role of computers in common man's daily routine. The high cost of software is also a driving force for the huge illegitimate use of pirated software products worldwide, especially in the third world countries. According to the results of a third independent study on global software piracy, conducted by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and the Software Publishers Association (SPA), the two leading trade associations of the software industry, revenue losses to the worldwide software industry due to piracy were estimated at $11.4 billion (US). The study estimates that, of the 574 million new business software applications installed globally during 1997, 228 million applications—or 40%—were pirated. This represents an increase of two million more new applications being pirated than in 1996. The software piracy is on the rise, although several products are available on the market for preventing illegitimate use of unauthorized copies of software. There was 16 percent decrease in estimated losses between 1995 and 1996, which were generally attributed to lower software prices. Piracy of a product is directly proportional to the need, availability and affordability of the product. The more affordable a product, the lower is it's piracy.
Shareware is an industry, which is barely supporting the talented but struggling programmers, who entirely depend on whatever little money the shareware users volunteer to pay them. If a fair compensation is paid to the shareware programmers from revenues generated by sponsor advertising, without increasing the shareware user costs, the shareware industry will become strong enough to bring high quality software to the computer users, without the inhibitory costs of retail software.
None of the present day software products available on the market incorporate sponsor messages, advertisements or any such approach to either subsidize the end user cost of the software application or improve the customer service offered by the software manufacturer. The computer's inherent interactive nature prevents the utilization of the conventional media advertising approach followed by the radio and television media. While a radio or television program can be interrupted briefly to relay advertising messages, a user working on an application cannot stop to watch advertisements. Hence novel approaches have to be adapted which neither interrupt the work of the user nor cause nuisance to the user. The prior art contains one such attempt made by Pirani and Ekedal (U.S. Pat. No. 5,105,184). Although the disclosure of Pirani and Ekedal is a technologically viable proposition, it falls short of transforming their invention into a commercially viable product, which is why even after almost a decade following their disclosure, no software products incorporating their invention have seen the marketplace. The invention of Pirani and Ekedal teaches the display of advertisement on the various screens of the application, such as menu screen, help screen etc. In a programming language e.g. visual basic, each screen of the application is represented by a form module, which contains programming codes for event procedures, sub-routine procedures and function procedures. Displaying an advertisement on a particular screen, will be a sub-routine procedure, which has to be encoded in the corresponding form module at design time. In practice any software manufacturer will be reluctant to insert subroutine codes for the advertisement file in each and every form module of the ready to market software application, which is required to enable Pirani and Ekedal invention. The risk for introducing new bugs is significant to affect the performance of the software application itself or at least cost the manufacturer further development time. Moreover, this kind of invention will be most likely practiced by the software resellers who subsidize the cost by ads, rather than the software manufacturer, who sells the software in retail. Integration of advertisement according to the teachings of Pirani and Ekedal will expose the source code to the resellers as a consequence of integration. No manufacturer of commercial software application will disclose the source code of his software product to the reseller. Another problem with this kind of integration of ads in the software application is the time relevance of the advertisement, which is very important in today's fast paced computer savvy world. An advertisement, integrated today in a software application, according to the teachings of Pirani and Ekedal, will be history in 6 months, without an update. Yet another shortcoming is absence of a link to the sponsor of specific advertisement for transacting potential business with the sponsor, or retrieving further information on the sponsor's products and services. These deficiencies will discourage a sponsor from paying for the advertisement.
Goldscheider and Konle in their invention of a system for the transmission and display of visual information described in Patent No. WO 97/06636 issued on Feb. 2, 1997, disclose a method for displaying advertisements on to the user's screen area from where the user can order the product or service advertised. They also suggest that such advertisement revenue can subsidize the cost of Internet access. But their invention fails to describe any means of assuring that the user does not avoid seeing the advertisement. This is essential, as advertisers would not want to pay for the unscrupulous use of the free or subsidized use of the Internet services, if their ads are not watched or seen voluntarily by the users. Secondly they also fail to show that such advertisement window retains the focus by permanent default, which is very important for assuring that the window display messages are visible to the user all the time that he is logged in to the service. They further fail to show a user-friendly way of getting around the window for accessing the information masked by such window. Very recently NetZero, Inc., Alta Vista, and other Companies like Tritium Network, Freei.Net, etc. have come up with their own versions of ad display approaches to subsidize the cost of Internet access. All of these companies are following more or less the same approach. They run an ad strip, which is displayed on the screen either blocking a functional area of the users browser application or reducing the browsing window size of the user's browser application. Such ad display windows developed by these companies retain the focus by permanent default assuring continuous display of the advertisement, thereby limiting the unscrupulous use, but they however mask or reduce the document window, to which they provide no easy solution. To access areas masked by such ad strips one has to physically move such ad strips, which may be quite annoying for the user.
Ideal method and system for sponsor information displays in software applications should contain the following qualities.    1. Minimum programming integration with the target software application.    2. Ease of running sponsor displays in any software application or between several applications or in a platform of applications, without modifying the source code of the individual form modules of the application.    3. Minimum interference with the user interaction with the target software application.    4. Minimum or no manipulation of the sponsor display window by the user.    5. Maximum non-stop display time and pixel space.    6. Regular update of the data displayed via a network link such as Internet or TV broadcast.    7. Ease of access to the application menus, tools and controls with no compromise on functionality of the application.    8. URL link for improving customer service or providing sponsor access to the user for any service or request desired.